bluegargantua

Hey,

So this past weekend was HAVOC, the historical miniatures wargame convention in Shrewsbury. I say historical and that's mostly true but there were some zombie/fantasy/pulp fiction games and one gorgeous baseball simulation with a meticulously recreated Fenway. I was in three games this weekend.

On Friday night I signed up for a Force on Force game that pitted Russian troops against Chechen rebels. The Chechens were holding a film crew hostage and the Russians had to get them back. I'm always a big fan of Force on Force because no matter which side you play you feel like the game is always going terribly for you -- even if you win. In this particular case, I was on the Chechen side staring down the table at a Russian force with several APCs and a T-72 tank. We had crap RPGs and a small selection of anti-tank teams that would have to roll exceptionally well to crack the tank but which would have a better shot against the APCs.

More importantly, our Chechens were veterans and rolled d8's for most things. Normally, the insurgent troops in Force on Force roll d6s vs. a regular troop's d8s which means it can be very difficult for the insurgents to hurt the regulars. Here, we were on a more even footing, although we had a much worse wound recovery table (basically, we had to roll a 6 on d6 to stay in the fight but the Russians were still capable on a 4 or better). Once that was explained, I felt like we had a better chance despite the armor coming for us.

In the end, a vicious up-front defense, a highly effective IED, and a lone machine gunner who would just not die no matter what the Russians did, managed to bog down the Russians so long they only just reached the objective by the time the game was called. In the post-mortem, we agreed that the Russians should just barrel forward to the objective, grab the hostages and then push back. The odds of surviving RPG attacks were really pretty good, even in the APCs and by shoving down quickly, it would've exposed most of our positions and given them an idea of how to work their way back.

On Saturday morning, I got a chance to try out Fireball Forward, a Company-level WWII game that one of the guys down at the hobby store has been flogging. I've picked up the rules and it seemed interesting so here was a chance to give it a whirl. The scenario was set in Stalingrad. The Germans had to capture buildings in a push to the Volga river while the Russians had to stop them. The Russians were spread very thin at first but reinforcements would arrive on barges during the game so we had to hurry.

The game is a little "game-y" but it has some neat features. In particular, when your stand of guys shoots, they pick up some d6s and a d20. The d20 is a "range die". Your squad's rifles have a range of (say) 10". So you can always hit anything within 10". Beyond that point, your d20 roll needs to be high enough that it plus your base 10" reaches the target. So if you want to shoot at a guy 15" away, you need to roll a 5 or better on the d20. On top of that, if the number you roll on the d20 is equal to or better than the range to the target in inches, then your dice are at +1 to hit. So if you rolled a 16 on your d20 for that target 15" away, then you'd add +1 to all your dice. It's a neat little mechanic that puts a little uncertainty into long distance shooting but makes close-up attacks a lot better. The only downside is that actually eliminating units is not as easy as you'd like. Units will break and rout and a leader can get them back into the fight.

In any event, I was on the German side. We got stuck in right away with a tough fight on our left flank. The commissar's SMG team dug in across the street and just couldn't be shifted. On the right we fared a bit better as we probed across the street and then rushed in to drive out a squad or two. In the center, our Stug marched down the street and stopped at some barricades only to get shocked by an anti-tank rifle team hidden in the rubble. They recovered and sent shells everywhere (even at one of the incoming barges) but never really had much of an effect.

Another asset the Germans had was a stack of "activation chips". You spend a chip and you can immediately go with one of your platoons. We mostly spent these well to rush forward and grab positions. By the end of the fourth turn we had outright control of four buildings and contested a fifth. Under the rules, we were winning. However, our hold was pretty tenuous and the Russians had landed all their troops and were ready to come roaring back. On the fifth turn they shoved us out of one building and contested another. We had to call the game then and there, but while it looked bad for the Germans, it was still a very close game and a sixth turn might have seen it shift our way. A fun little game and I'd be interested to try another scenario or two.

Saturday afternoon, I sat down for a demo game of Crossfire. Crossfire is another WWII ruleset set at a Company-level. The defining feature of the ruleset is that there are no fixed length turns or measurement. Basically, if you have the initiative you can take actions with any of your units until you fail at an action and then the initiative passes to your opponent. So I can shoot with a unit and if they suppress or kill an enemy they can go again (or another one of your guys can go). But if they miss or only pin, then they've failed and your opponent can go. I've had the rules for a while and was keen to give them a go.

My opponent had never seen the rules before and it was his first time at a wargaming convention or even wargaming. I, uh, I kinda crushed him. I will say that he did manage to obliterate about half of my forces with off-board artillery and we were both kinda screwing around with the rules rather than pursuing objectives. In the end, we had a long post-mortem where we discussed what we both could've done better. He seemed to be having a good time so I hope I haven't driven him away from the hobby.

Crossfire is interesting but actually getting any kind of damage on a target seems to require just a ridiculous amount of co-ordinated firepower. I should really play a few more (and larger) scenarios, but I think Fireball Forward is edging it out (although I love the variable turn length features).

I managed to get away without emptying my wallet even. I just picked up some 15mm Germans to build out a platoon for Chain of Command. The figures were by Peter Pig and they were going for way cheap so it was a really good deal. That means I've got some more little dudes to paint up. Which is another post I owe you guys.

later
Tom

Hi,

So I did more than paint buildings this summer. I also painted (and am still painting) some little dudes.

There's a company out of Poland called Assault Publishing that puts out wargame rules and miniatures. They do a line of 15mm sci fi and the human faction is called the New Vistula Legion. A fellow gamer was selling off a huge lot of them at discount prices so I snapped it up. I figure they'll be good opponents for my professionally painted group and just good sci-fi figures in general.

I've gone though about half the figures and have enough of them organized that I can show them off. So let's see what I've done so far...

( The Poor Bloody Infantry )

Anyway, that's all the figures so far. Next up are the snipers/scouts/LRRP teams, then the support weapon teams and finally the company HQ and a set of TV crews. Should be a lot of fun.

later
Tom

Hey,

Oh LJ, I'm falling down on posting to you. Let's put that to rights, shall we? Herein I talk about the various media I've consumed over the last fortnight.

Movies

I've seen two. First was The Painting (their website is down at the moment). This is an animated French film dubbed into English. It's really quite good, sort of an artistic Toy Story. You have this painting done up in this colorful, slightly abstracted style wherein live the All-Dones, the Half-Dones and the Sketches. The Painter has been away for some time and the All-Dones figure he's never coming back and wouldn't now be a good time to rid themselves of the incomplete people in their picture. One of the All-Dones, Ramo, is in love with a Half-Done. He, along with Half-Done Lola and a Sketch named Plume find their way out of the painting and into the artist's studio where they move from painting to painting trying to track down their creator and get some help.

It was a fun little movie. There was a fairly dense amount of story going on for an animated film and the style was a refreshing change of pace from Pixar-like precision. Sadly it's not playing locally anymore but it's worth hunting around for.

This past week I saw Furious 6, the latest installment in the Vin Diesel franchise. It's trying hard to draw the threads of it's previous movies together to create a sort of Fast and Furious-verse where punk street racers are the world's most successful thieves. It's not high art, but this movie knows exactly what it wants to be and it's exactly what it wants to be as hard as it can. So I call this a pretty good movie.

How good is this movie? Normally, if a film makes me go "wait a minute, how is X even possible?" that's the sign of a bad movie. I should be so engrossed in the film that the flaws don't hit me until afterward. In this movie, there is a huge problem with the final set piece of the film and I couldn't stop thinking about it...and I just didn't care. Fast cars, punch ups, heists, the movie just piles it all on like a Thanksgiving dinner of action movie. Oh, and the main bad guy doesn't rely on being captured by the good guys to show off how smart he is/complete his fiendish design. Sure, his plan has a lot of terrible flaws, but at least being captured isn't a vital part of it.

Video Games

I've been playing way too much Borderlands 2. I don't know why I like this stupid game so much. Kill things, take their stuff, level up so you can kill tougher things and take their better stuff -- ok, so maybe it's self-evident why I like this game so much. But exploring the different character types means I'm playing through the same content again and again....and then I'm playing through it again on super-hard mode to level up my guys and gain funky new powers.

There's been a bunch of DLC, but the new gameplay content gets blown through very quickly. There's one final DLC to drop and it involves one of my favorite NPCs so I'm back at the grind, but seriously.

Board Games

There was a game called Glory to Rome that had a reputation as a fantastic game with terrible artwork. There was a kickstarter to produce a new version with better art that I backed. This turned into a minor shit-storm as the guys running the kickstarter were swamped by their success and poor post-funding management. The kickstarter ended in August 2011, they announced a Christmas delivery and I think I got my copy in Oct/Nov of 2012. There were failures but I think it was compounded by backers who expected too much from a kickstarter and made the whole thing worse.

Anyway, I got my copy and I got to play it last week. Glory to Rome is a card game where you try score victory points through completing buildings, stashing away valuable materials and a few other ways. Each card can be used as a building, an action, a raw material, or victory points depending on when you play it and where you play it from. There's a lot to take in. My poor girlfriend was hopelessly confused (we were playing in a high-distraction zone).

Her trouble with the rules did not stop her from beating me. I came in dead last in a four player game. There are a lot of things you can do and many paths to victory. I got caught up in building buildings so I built buildings that gave me advantages to building more buildings. But I wasn't stocking my vault with VPs so by the time my build-all-the-buildings strategy started to kick in the game was over and I had nothing.

I'm totally ready to get in a few more rounds of this.

Books

My usual stomping ground.

I did not finish The Age of Scorpio by Gavin Smith. It had a lot of promise from the blurb and I ordered it from the UK and...it was a letdown. I was expecting sci-fi, but I got sci-fi, fantasy Celtic, modern-day occultish-si-fi in three interleaving stories that left me cold after a few chapters.

So then it was on to Love Among the Particles by Norman Lock. This is a collection of Mr. Lock's short stories and the first few were much stronger than the end. Early stories about an interview with Mr. Hyde or a mummy travelling to New York to consult on the film of his life are quite good. After that, the stories get kind of same-y. In particular, the titular story could replace several others since it all covers the same ground.

After that it was time for Hello America by J. G. Ballard. The novel is set in the future after the energy crisis of the 70's never got any better as world oil ran out. American's fled their country to re-settle in European enclaves. A dam built over the Bearing Strait changed ocean currents and turned everything east of the Rockies into desert and everything west into rainforest.

The book follows a small expedition that sets out to investigate unusual seismic and radiological signals coming from the continent. It's supposed to be a quick look around before returning home but the exploration team is made up of American descendants and all of them have their own dreams for the New World.

So yeah, the book has a lot of problems on a factual point of view, but it's not that kind of book and as the Great American Wastelands test the members of the team (in particular, a stowaway named Wayne), it's a look at what drove Americans in the past and even today (accounting for the fact that the book is almost 30-years old). A fun read.

Oh, and I also read through Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley. This is an autobiographical comic about Ms. Knisley and her relationship to food and her family. She was raised by foodies in a family of foodies and that has shaped a lot of her experiences. She's far from being snotty about her food (indeed she really loves junk food -- partially because it pissed off her parents and mostly because it's tasty) and covers a lot of ground through the lens of food.

She also includes wonderfully illustrated recipes for the foods she loves from pickles to fried mushrooms to sushi to shepherd's pie. Each recipe gets a 2-4 page spread and they're all very enticing. Indeed my girlfriend made the fried mushrooms and they came out astonishing well. I'd kind of like to see her do a whole cookbook this way.

So...yeah, that's what I've been consuming lately. The little dudes are coming along as well. Actually, it's the little buildings in this case. Hopefully there will be a post (sooner than a fortnight from now) where I can show off what I've been putting together.

later
Tom

Hey,

So my recent return to miniature painting was sparked by the Dark Ages/Viking campaign that the club I regularly game with wanted to run. I got a bunch of minis, painted them all up and had a horde of Saxons ready to go.

I believe we played one game.

I knew we had a bunch of guys with figures and I had an interesting set of Viking rules called Strandhogg that I'd been meaning to try out. So I put out the call and a couple Saturdays ago we had a fight.

( An Odin's Eye view of the game )

Everyone seemed to have a good time and was keen to try out the game again. I need to come up with some sort of fast movement rule to help folks cover ground or deal with chasing down heavily-laden opponents and such. But once combat was joined things moved at a fair clip and combat was a real roller-coaster. So hopefully we can get in a few more sessions and my little dudes were not painted in vain.

later
Tom

Hey,

This weekend I ran a game of Force On Force for my usual gaming group down at Hobby Bunker. The scenario came out of the Enduring Freedom source book and was supposed to represent the fighting that took place in the early days of Operation Anaconda in March of 2002. That operation was marked by a number of snafus and screw-ups that could've spelled disaster for the Americans and it was only the bravery and determination of troops on the ground that got them home safe again.

( In our game, the Americans were all out of luck )

I apologized about the one-sided-ness of the game, but everyone did seem to have a pretty good time and they're interested in trying other scenarios so I guess that's a win. It's too bad, I was hoping to use this scenario later in August for the club's game day, but I might have to change it to something else. I really need to get more terrain put together. Being out in the open like that is killer, especially between two evenly matched opponents and most scenarios are a little more urban in nature.

Ah well, chalk one up for experience.
Tom

Hey,

So this weekend I went to HAVOC, a wargaming convention put on by Boston Battlegroup every year in late March/early April. It's a fun time and a chance to try a bunch of new stuff, do a little shopping and I've been going pretty steadily for the past few years. Also, this year a number of games were being run by the guys at Boston Trained Bands who I usually game with on Saturday monrings. I didn't run any games or help the guys with theirs, although I did help them playtest stuff they were doing.

So what did I do?

( Hill 112 )
( With the Lithuanian Forest Brothers 1947 )
( The Bear Went Over the Mountain )
( Shopping! )

Anyway. That was HAVOC and it was fun.

later
Tom

Hey,

Finished up the second platoon of US Army soldiers in 15mm for my modern-day games.





So the only thing left is the command squad (with company leaders, medic, radio guy and heavy machine guns). That should give me enough US forces to play the various Force on Force scenarios I have. I might round it out with a couple of specialists (sniper teams, bomb disposal, K9, etc.), but there's no pressing need for any at the moment.

I also need to kit out the Americans with a motor pool and I've already started work on that, but I'm gonna need a lot more. The US Army definitely represents Americans' love of cars.

later
Tom

Hey,

So more work with 15mm soldiers. I painted up a batch of insurgents a couple weeks ago and they'll need someone to go up against, so last week, I did up a bunch of American army guys:





Yeah, they're not painted in Middle East cammo, but I'm also hoping to do some "what if" WWIII scenarios so they're European green. It's a pretty nice set up -- four squads with leader, M40 grenade lancher, SAW and rifleman. The platoon leader has a couple of riflemen and two Javelin anti-tank guys to work with.

I've got a second platoon identical to this and then a command staff to paint up and that should be more than enough US forces for most games I have in mind. I will, however, need to pick up another big stash of insurgent forces to provide a meaningful opposition.

later
Tom

Hey,

I painted some more minis this month and finally had a chance to photograph them for you.

( here be little dudes )

So that's October. Next up, a batch of US troopers for our Insurgent friends to fight and then probably some more Insurgents (they usually arrive in pretty large groups and the 20 figures I have now, aren't enough).

later
Tom

Hi,

So you may remember I spent most of July/August painting up a bunch of Saxons for a campaign game being run by the Boston Trained Bands. Last weekend we had a test game so my guys got into action for the first time.

( Well, maybe I got all my bad rolling out of the way... )

But hey, it was fun and my investment of time and effort has started to pay off.

Later
Tom